The worst moments do not happen when I think about the Master.
The worst moments happen when I am not thinking about him.
Because that is when he appears.
Sometimes it happens before I open my eyes.
There is a strange instant between sleep and morning when I do not quite remember who I am yet. For one or two seconds there is only the weight of the blankets, a grey light behind my eyelids, and the feeling that something is waiting for me.
And the first thing that appears is not a memory.
It is him.
Not his face.
Not a scene.
Not an order.
Just the certainty.
The same absurd certainty you have about the existence of a door in a room that is still dark.
And that embarrasses me more than it should.
Because I am not even looking for him.
Sometimes I test it.
I try to think about anything else.
A shopping list.
Work.
A video I watched the night before.
It does not matter.
I always find something.
A gesture.
A sentence.
A way of holding a cup.
And suddenly he is there again.
Not as an image.
As a gravity.
A few days ago I was waiting at a traffic light.
An elderly men was carrying a bag of oranges.
One orange fell.
It rolled across the pavement.
Nothing important.
Nobody would remember it an hour later.
Neither should I.
But I remember exactly how it rolled.
Because for one second I thought he would have noticed it too.
And ever since then the scene has remained archived.
Not the orange.
The possibility that he might have seen the orange.
That is what remains.
And the more I think about it, the less sense it makes.
There are worse moments.
Completely ridiculous moments.
I am watching videos.
Videos that have absolutely nothing to do with anything.
A documentary about ships.
A man repairing a pipe.
A camera recording rain at a Japanese train station.
And suddenly I catch myself wondering what he would have thought.
I do not even need an answer.
The question simply appears.
Like a twitch.
Like a habit.
Like an extremely polite illness.
The embarrassment comes afterwards.
Because I notice.
I realize I have spent several minutes watching the video through the presence of someone who is not actually there.
And that is difficult to explain even inside my own head.
There is a strange sadness attached to all of this.
Although sadness is not exactly the word.
Sadness has a cause.
It has a direction.
It points somewhere.
This does not.
This is different.
It feels more like discovering a room inside a house you have lived in for years.
A room you never knew existed.
And yet somehow it was always there.
It does not hurt.
But it occupies space.
And the more space it occupies, the less remains for everything else.
Sometimes I am eating lunch with coworkers.
Everyone talks.
Everyone laughs.
One of them tells an irrelevant story about a customer.
I nod.
I participate.
I even smile.
But at the same time there is another layer.
Another conversation.
Further down.
And in that silent conversation the Master is still there.
Doing nothing.
Saying nothing.
Simply remaining.
Like a circular mark that has almost disappeared from the skin yet still returns to memory whenever a hand accidentally brushes that place.
That is what makes it so difficult to explain.
It is not intensity.
It is permanence.
The Marquis de Sade wrote extensively about violent desires.
But nobody warned me about this.
Nobody explained that the most humiliating obsession is not the one that screams.
It is the one that waits.
The one that appears while you search for your keys.
While you read an irrelevant notification.
While you stare at a spoon inside an empty cup.
The one that manages to occupy part of the morning without asking permission.
The one that remains.
And remains.
And remains.
Until one day you realize you no longer remember exactly when it began.
You only remember that it is there.
As if it had always been there.
The neck I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
